Archive

Notes & Queeries: Best Friends Forever

Notes & Queeries is a monthly column that focuses on the personal side of pop culture for lesbians and bisexual women.

J. Courtney Sullivan’s debut novel, Commencement, begins as Celia, Bree, April and Sally – four 26-year-old Smith College alumnae – gather together for Sally’s wedding. These four women met during their first year at college, when they all lived in the same hallway in King House, their dorm. Though several of them kissed other girls in college (this is Smith, after all), only one winds up in a long-term relationship with another woman.

Don’t let those statistics dissuade you from reading the book, though; I can say flat out that this book is the queerest mainstream novel I’ve read in a long time. And by queer, I really mean queer – Commencement goes beyond coming-out stories and also tackles feminist politics and transgender rights. All of that is being packaged by its publisher, Knopf, in a Tiffany-blue book cover that sweetly sings, “Chick lit for educated ladies!”

I first heard about Commencement in a New York Times article that described it as “one of this year’s most inviting summer novels.” I immediately emailed my college friends to tell them about it. One of them responded somewhat drily, “It sounds like perfect beach reading – for us!”

I didn’t go to Smith, but I did go to a women’s college – Wellesley – and for the first time ever in my reading experience, Commencement allowed me to read about a group of characters who could have been carbon copies, just slightly smudged, of myself and my own friends.

Any discussion of women’s colleges and their close friendship circles can sometimes smack of self-satisfaction and elite privilege.

Those stereotypes exist for a reason, but what I know is this: I was one of the most socially awkward 18-year-olds to walk the planet. Everyone may think this about herself, but I guarantee you that in my case, it was the truth. My college friends – who came from a variety of different backgrounds, not all wealthy – are the best prize I ever got for going to Wellesley.

Whatever kind of privilege the college gave me, it paled in comparison to the love and support my friends have shown to me over the years.

So there’s no way I could read Commencement with an unbiased eye. I opened the cover expecting to sink into a familiar, friendly landscape – and I did.

Each character in the book struggles in her own way with finding her place in the world. Celia, an aspiring novelist, works for a publisher in New York while navigating the murky (and often drunken) waters of the Manhattan dating scene. April is a radical feminist activist who makes guerilla-style documentaries about the exploitation of women. Sally, whose mother died just before she began college, has an affair with her much older professor while she is an undergrad, but also becomes the first to marry a truly nice guy.

And Bree – well, Bree is the one I’m interested in. Though she comes to Smith as a proper Southern belle, already engaged to her high school sweetheart, college quickly changes her. She breaks it off with her fiance and soon falls in love with Lara, an Asian-American soccer player and fellow Smith student. (Incidentally, Lara was definitely my favorite character, even though she was peripheral for most of the book.)

Bree believes that she is only a SLUG – a Smith Lesbian Until Graduation. But four years after graduation, Bree and Lara are still together, battling their way through a relationship hampered by homophobia. Bree’s family won’t accept their daughter’s lesbian relationship, and Bree herself clings to the belief that she’s straight, even after living with Lara for four years in San Francisco.

I admit I found Bree’s denial about her sexual orientation a bit difficult to believe, simply because Commencement paints Smith as such an incredibly queer place.

When the girls first arrive at their dorm, they are informed that showering with your girlfriend is not allowed between 8 and 10 a.m.: “Celia wondered if this was just a seniority tactic – they’d all heard the lore about Smith lesbians, but was girl-on-girl shower sex really such an issue that it necessitated a house rule?”

The showers don’t come up again in Commencement, but the mention of them sets the stage for chapters in which the characters blithely attend Smith parties in which making out with other girls certainly has nothing to do with titillating men – because there aren’t any.

Sullivan writes: “It was as if they were all playing at being gay, though they knew it was only a pose. Or perhaps some of them were trying it on for real.”

Trying on different identities – lesbian, feminist, writer, wife – this is what the characters in Commencement do.

They’re caught up in the messy world of 20-somethings everywhere. Decisions must be made about careers (how much of oneself can be invested in a job?), relationships (which ones matter the most?), and self (who am I, anyway?).

When I was 26, I also went to the wedding of a college friend; I’ll call her Anne.

At that time, I was living in Los Angeles, where I was doing fieldwork for my master’s degree in cultural anthropology. I was interviewing television producers about their jobs; finding ways to get myself onto vast, cold sound stages; having lunch in West L.A. and fumbling with a tape recorder over the background noise of loud restaurants. Flying to Chicago for my friend’s wedding provided me with an oasis of familiarity in the middle of all that newness.

There was a group of seven of us back then; we all crowded into a couple of hotel rooms where we talked to each other so vigorously it might have sounded like we were arguing.

One of my friends – I’ll call her Heather – was one of Anne’s bridesmaids. The funnier part was that Heather was also Anne’s ex-girlfriend, and Anne was about to have a very traditional wedding to marry a man.

At that time, Heather performed in a drag king troupe, and she was a pinup girl in a locally produced dyke calendar. Seeing her in her ex-girlfriend’s straight, traditional wedding – in a formal gown, no less – was so incongruous we joked about it for years afterward.

I took a photo of Heather in her sky blue floor-length bridesmaid dress in the hotel, the bouquet of flowers she had carried limp in her hand due to the summer heat, a cigarette dangling out of her mouth. It was comical; I could imagine a cartoon text bubble floating above her head, asking, how did I get here in this dress?

When I left the wedding weekend and returned to my sublet in Westwood near UCLA, I felt completely lost. The sudden absence of my friends – in combination with my life in a strange new city – was just like losing a limb. I was off-balance without them. That was the first time I remember deeply missing my friends; I was homesick for a group of women who were my first home away from home.

These days, I look back at Wellesley with a romantic nostalgia, even though I did have some difficult experiences there. I remember sitting outside in the Quad at night, looking up at the lighted windows in the dorms around me and feeling utterly devastated by loneliness.

But if I were to go back to that very same patch of grass today, I know I would only feel the warm glow of fond memories. I would remember walking with friends to the dining hall; sipping mini bottles of awful, sweet liqueur in Anne’s dorm room; hanging out at the basement cafe where the cutest dykes on campus microwaved shredded cheese onto tortilla chips in a messy semblance of nachos.

Before I went to Wellesley, and even while I was an undergrad there, I never really understood why the alumnae were so dedicated to the college. Now I do.

It’s because despite all the drama that happened during our college years, we were surrounded by a protective cushion, as if the college were enveloped in bubble wrap. Even if things sometimes sucked – and they did – there was a feeling that everything would ultimately be all right. I think this was the result of the lived experience of privilege.

Not all Wellesley students come from wealthy backgrounds; a healthy number of my friends hailed from working class and ordinary middle-class families. Yet the campus and its buildings, in comparison to any of our parents’ homes, was palatial. Ming vases stood unguarded in Tower Court, a dorm that resembled a gothic castle, right down to its rumored ghosts.

Even the dorm I spent three years in, the comfortably worn-down Shafer Hall, boasted oriental rugs and a grand piano in its living room. They were scarred by countless footsteps and the press of generations of fingers, but that’s what marked them as upper-class. They were decaying remnants of greatness; they were like old money.

Every Wednesday, tea was served in our living room, generally accompanied by cake or cookies. The tea came in a large, stainless steel urn rather than in china teapots, but that tradition later carried on into our lives as alumnae.

Every holiday season, each local Wellesley alumnae club hosts a holiday tea at the grand home of one of our more successful alum. The houses are generally filled with gorgeous works of art and surrounded by manicured lawns or gardens. It’s a not-so-subtle reminder of the way we used to live, at college.

We didn’t have personal maids exactly, but the bathrooms and common areas were cleaned by housekeeping staff, and dry cleaning could be picked up and delivered at the bell desk. This was the reception desk at every dorm, where male visitors had to be announced over the intercom so that you knew to put on a bathrobe if you were on your way to the shower.

Interestingly, Wellesley required all of us students to work at the bell desk. I remember that during first-year orientation they told us it would teach us self-confidence. We were policing our own community, in a way, but it also taught us to possess authority in front of strangers. Working at the bell desk might have been one of the college’s most secretive tricks to turn us into Wellesley women: women who know they’re powerful.

All of these privileges – for that’s what they were – created an environment that padded our lives. Even when I was utterly depressed, for example, I always knew where my next meal would come from: the dining hall.

In a few days, my college friends are coming together for another wedding: mine.

It’s been nine years since that first wedding, and in those intervening years we’ve all changed to some degree. I think most of us are done trying on different identities for the time being, or we’re settling into the ones that have claimed us: writer, businesswoman, teacher, mother.

At my wedding, there will be no bridesmaids. There won’t be any wedding dresses, either, even though, technically, there are two brides. But just as they were nine years ago, my college friends will be there. I’ll tell them that if they need a book to read on the plane, they should pick up Commencement.

I want to know what they think of this fictional mirror of our lives. Do they believe Bree’s story? Do they find the women in the novel to be both wonderfully familiar and frustratingly different, as I did? Are we as hard on each other – and as supportive – as Celia, Sally, April, and Bree? I suspect that we are.

For more on Malinda Lo, visit her website.

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button